Why blog?

About everyone these days agrees that when you have a website, having a blog is a must. The benefits of your own blog are numerous…

• It gives you an opportunity to show yourself from a personal side. When you also sell products or services online, this will help you build credit and trust with your future customers…

• It makes it easy to add fresh content without having to create html pages from scratch.

• When you post on your blog, you never have to update your navigation links on all of your existing webpages - the blog script automatically takes care of this.

• The search engines love your site a lot more all of the sudden because of the continuous stream of fresh content.

• And many more…

I spent quite a lot of time reading about blogs and discovering all the cool things you can do with them.

WordPress and WordPress Only…

My first blog was created over a year ago and as I learned more, I only became more enthusiastic about blogs. I started with Blogger, which is easy for beginners but quite limited in what you can do with them. I then tried Nucleus, but I settled for WordPress in the end which IMHO is the best script around. Easy to work with, understandable user guides and a great supportive community.

However…

Getting your own blog to look the way you want it and have all the right elements included takes a bit of time and effort. The problem is not so much that it’s a difficult thing to do - just surf the net and you’ll find literally millions of people blogging these days. They all managed to set up their blogs…

But when you want it optimized for the search engines, offer subscriptions, promote any products you sell and include some other cool features, you have to work your way through quite a list of little tasks. And before you know it, you are literally lost in all the stuff that needs to be taken care of.

Reviewing my own blogs, I found that I forget things all the time…

Process Maps and Action Sheets

It is for this reason I created a set of process maps and action sheets which outline the step-by-step installation process. They are a great help to me. Not only does it take me about a third of the time to get a blog set up now, I also have a decent administration of what exactly I installed on my blogs and where to find the resource documentation.

WordPress is open source software. As my personal thank you to everyone who has contributed to making WordPress the great blogging script which it is, I decided to make my WP Blog Installation Action Sheets freely available to everyone who is looking for some more structure in the blog installation and customization process.

This is a pdf file which requires Acrobat Reader 7.0 to open and read. In addition it has been zipped to save bandwidth. For additional help with downloading and opening the file please see this page…

File name: WPBlogInstallationActionSheets.zip / WPBlogInstallationActionSheets.pdf
Contents:

• Very brief introduction
• Blog installation check list (27 steps)
• Blog installation process map (visual tool)
• Blog log / design forms
• Blog installation process map including recommended tweaks
• Blog resources forms (service accounts & plugins)

Initial comments, tips and tricks will be recorded on a separate page in this blog. You can find these at http://thinelectrons.com/blog/wp-blog-installation-action-sheets

If you have any question regarding the use of these action sheets, please post them here so everything related to this pdf stays nicely together.

When you decide to download and use the action sheets, please let me know how you like them. I look forward to hearing back from you!

Patricia Ritsema van Eck

P.S.
This is a “no-strings-attached” download, meaning you don’t need to register for it first. However, if you want to be informed about upgrades to the action sheets please register a Thin Electrons membership.

Knowing myself I’m likely to include some more action sheets in the future and I’m also very open to improving them according to any feedback I receive…

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